The proliferation of exchange-traded funds into seemingly every nook and cranny of the investment landscape has some people pondering whether the frontier is closed. Perhaps that’s premature, said speakers at an ETF industry gathering in New York City on Thursday sponsored by ETF Trends.

Matt Hougan, CEO of Inside ETFs, recalled that it was as long ago as early last decade when he read the first article saying that all of the ETF boxes have been checked and we’re at the end of ETFs.

Obviously, things haven’t played out that way.

“During the past three or four years there have been a lot of large ETF categories appear. Currency hedging and single-factor ETFs came out of nowhere and became huge things,” Hougan said, adding that various bond strategies could be included on that list.

“My guess is there will be more [new strategies],” he said. “I’m sort of long the creativity of the ETF industry. I think there’s still room to grow when you think about bottom-up hedge fund replication, private equity and other areas where there are still opportunities that can be delivered at low costs.”

And then there’s always the long talked about, yet slow to develop roll out of actively-managed ETFs. As noted by panel moderator Tom Lydon, the editor and publisher of ETF Trends, it has been tough to beat the market and to beat pure-beta, or index-based strategies during the long bull market. Investors have taken note and piled into passive funds as a result.

“But what happens when we have a significant bear market again?” he asked. “Will active management come back to life—albeit in different flavors? It’s probably going to happen because things operate in cycles.”

He posited that we could see active strategies within ETFs become more attractive, especially as more investors shift to ETFs and want to have multiple active strategies in their portfolios.

“We’ve already seen that to some degree with smart beta as we’ve gone from single-factor [strategies] with annual rebalancing to multi-factor with as often as monthly rebalancing,” Lydon said. “These really are active strategies.”

One of the factors behind the slow rollout of active ETFs has been fears that exposing active mutual fund portfolios to daily disclosure in an ETF needed for intraday trading runs the risk of front running by professional traders such as hedge funds.

Dave Nadig director of ETFs at FactSet Research Systems, said that might be changing a little bit.

“We’re seeing active managers, particularly smaller active managers, just willing to throw in the towel and say, ‘You know what? I trust my investment process and I’ll go all in and just show people my portfolio and if they want to chase me, that’s fine,’” Nadig said.

In the world of bonds, he added, three leading fixed-income managers—DoubleLine, Pimco and Fidelity—have exposed their actively managed strategies to investors in the form of their successful ETFs.   

“The common thread among the successes we’ve seen so far among active ETFs are known firms, strong managers with strong track records, and fixed income,” said Ben Johnson, Morningstar’s director of global ETF research. “They’re not nearly as worried about showing their hands than equity managers would be.”

Concerns over front running has spawned creative strategies to thwart prying eyes by keeping holdings non-transparent, such as the exchange-traded mutual fund structure from NextShares, which are active funds owned by Eaton Vance that began trading in February. These hybrid products have the low fees and intraday trading of ETFs, but like mutual funds are priced at net asset value just once daily after the market closes. The funds don’t have to disclose their holdings on a daily basis.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has shot down efforts by other companies to bring non-transparent, actively managed exchange-traded products to market. Hougan said he believes that’s not in the best interest of investors.

“I think there should be a hue and cry to push the SEC to approve non-transparent strategies whether or not you think active managers will rise again,” he said. “Investors are losing money and paying additional taxes because they’re forced to buy active only in the mutual fund structure. So the SEC is trading a small potential risk for a daily cost where people are paying huge amounts of money.”